Articles / WebWork

Hashtag hijacking, tweeting under a trending hashtag to serve your own agenda, is an underused tactic. There is some productive fun to be had for those who are a dab hand on the tweet button. Keep reading…

Unifor is applying the open-organizing approach to their online communications. Their monthly question-and-answer period with the union’s president, on Twitter, is making a bit of a splash. Keep reading…

I’ve used my WebWork column before to look at the distressingly negative experiences many women have online, including being flamed or otherwise harassed. And how those experiences might negatively affect women’s receptiveness to their unions’ online organizing efforts. In other words, I’ve looked at the gendered division of the internet. Regrettably, it’s still an issue.A recent article in The Pacific Standard, ... Keep reading…

Longtime Our Times reader and supporter Allan Gottheil called in last summer to suggest an idea for a column: what I’ll call “tech-enabled broader-based participation.” Continuous democracy? Breakfast-table mobilization? Whatever it gets called, it is about the wider and deeper inclusion of members in their union’s activities, on a daily basis, through a process similar to polling.For instance, imagine a smartphone app that connects members to their union. The union wants to kno… Keep reading…

Katie Arnup at Unifor is the first Canadian unionist I’ve seen, to date (besides me), to use a badge on Facebook: a small logo or other graphic in the corner of a user’s photo. It’s an inexpensive way for union members to show their allegiance to, and play a small but collectively important part in, campaigns such as ... Keep reading…

I suspect I was being baited, as a LabourStart emailer when, out for dinner with some union friends recently, I was treated to an “email is dead” screed. The argument was that email has become so ubiquitous and routine that it gets no real attention. And because so much of what we receive is junk, unless the message is coming from someone we trust, we delete it without even opening it.There’s some truth to that, particularly regarding trusting the sender. To which my response is: get t… Keep reading…

I need a list of things that I should be reminded of regularly. Age, or perhaps resilient enthusiasms that fly in the face of reality, are the culprits behind my forgetting. Top of the list is that the digital divide isn’t a Global South vs. Global North thing. It’s a “my neighbourhood” thing.As I was writing this column, my attention was drawn to comments made by some pretty active (online and in meatspace) trade unionists about Canada Post and probable service cuts. Asked to support ... Keep reading…

I often make references here to “digital utopians,” the folks of the ‘90s who kept telling us the internet would set our minds and news media free from the constraints and censorship imposed by corporate ownership. We could all be our own newspaper, TV and radio outlets. Always implicit, and sometimes embarrassingly explicit, in the online utopian screeds of that decade was the hope or assumption that nastiness like racism and sexism were ideological impositions on workers and that, on… Keep reading…

This past winter I was asked to speak at the Ontario Public Service Employees Union’s human rights conference. With the name “Social Change Through Social Media,” its focus was on how to use social media in organizing for equity. The only such conference that I’m aware of, it was a great idea, well-executed. (If there have been others, let me know.)One old question was given a new spin: Why do some social media campaigns ... Keep reading…

As my deadline for this column approached (okay, as it receded in the rearview mirror, much to Our Times’ editor’s chagrin) two announcements generated another tidal wave of how-to articles on using social media in organizing: 1) Facebook now has more than 1 billion users, a number rising almost as fast as FB’s share price is dropping, and 2) during the coverage of the American elections, polling seemed to have fallen out of favour and been replaced with Twitter-follower and FB “friend… Keep reading…